Chapter 6 - Thirty-Two Dollars and Forty Cents
By midnight, the snow had stopped falling over Harrow Lake, leaving seven inches of heavy, wet Michigan slush banked against the lodge’s cedar skirting.
Dr. Ashby had left at eleven, after writing down the private phone number of her personal attorney in Grand Rapids and leaving a two-hundred-dollar tip on the bar for the two dishwashers who had spent two hours cleaning up our abandoned reception. Uncle Robert had taken Grandma Marin back to Hastings, not to Bellweather Grove, but to his own three-bedroom ranch on the south side of town where his daughter Sarah had already aired out the front bedroom and put fresh flannel sheets on the double bed.
Ivy Kesler had gone with them, her ninety-dollar afternoon having turned into a thirty-six-hour private-duty assignment that Uncle Robert paid for on the spot with five crisp hundred-dollar bills he pulled from a leather envelope he kept in his glove compartment.
“Don't you worry about the money, Essie,” Uncle Robert had said, his voice still trembling with the fury of a brother whose family name had been dragged through the muck of a county court. “Sanford worked thirty-one years at that plant without taking a single day of sick leave. He didn't do it so Vaughn could buy pigskin watchbands and play twenty-one with state troopers in Bradley. We’ll settle with the Grove on Monday.”
Now, the only sound in the lodge was the low, steady hum of the refrigeration unit behind the bar and the wind whistling through the tops of the white pines near the boat launch.
Ellis and I sat together on the bottom step of the lodge’s grand central staircase.
My wedding dress was ruined. The left sleeve was torn from the armscye down to the elbow, exposing the red, puffy skin where my mother’s nails had raked across my bicep. The hem was black with grease from the kitchen threshold where Dad had stumbled, and the ivory train that had cost four hundred dollars to bustle was soaked with grey snow-melt from the entryway runner.
Ellis had taken off his tuxedo jacket and wrapped it around my shoulders. It smelled of cedar, laundry soap, and the cold iron of the framing square he’d been using on our dining room table three days ago.
Between his knees sat the walnut box.
The sliding lid was open an inch, just as it had been when Dad’s hand hit my cheek.
“We have to count it,” I said.
My voice sounded small, thin, and dry, like an autumn leaf being turned over by the wind on a concrete sidewalk.
Ellis looked down at the box. “We don't have to do anything tonight, Esther. We can leave it with Greg. He’s got the safe in the back office.”
“No,” I said. I reached out and took the lid, sliding it back along its wooden groove until the cherry wood hit the stop with that soft, familiar *tock*. “If I don't look at it now, Ellis, I’m going to spend the whole night in that hotel room wondering what else he touched.”
Ellis nodded. He didn't argue. He knew that for four years, my entire life had been held together by the fact that if you write every number down in the column, the column has to add up eventually. The mess only kills you when you stop counting.
He reached into the box and pulled out the first envelope.
It was from the Gables—twenty-five dollars in a card with a picture of two bluebirds sitting on a fence rail.
The second was from my second cousin Tim—fifty dollars and a gift certificate to a hardware store in Middleville.
Then came the white legal-sized envelope with the slanted, shaky handwriting I had seen on the check Trish had found by the gift table.
Ellis opened it. Inside were two checks.
The first was Great-Aunt Loretta’s: two hundred and fifty dollars, made out to *Vaughn Stark*, with the memo line *For Esther and Ellis* scratched through with a heavy black ballpoint pen and the words *Trustee Account* written above it in my father’s cramped, upright hand.
The second check was from Great-Uncle Donald in Muskegon. Three hundred dollars.
Made out to *Cash*.
The back of the check was already endorsed: *Vaughn Stark, Special Agent*.
Ellis laid Donald’s check flat on his knee. He smoothed the paper with his thumb, his jaw working slowly as he looked at the blue ink.
“He had the stamp in his pocket, didn't he?” Ellis asked quietly.
I reached into the pocket of my ruined gown, where Deputy Miller had handed me the contents of Dad’s coat before they led him out to the cruiser.
It was a small, self-inking rubber stamp with a red plastic casing, the kind you buy at an office supply store for nine dollars. I clicked it once against the palm of my hand.
The red ink left four clean, professional lines on my skin:
**FOR DEPOSIT ONLY**
**STARK LAKE PROPERTIES LLC**
**ACCT # 4409-8812**
**LAKE MICHIGAN CREDIT UNION**
“He didn't even wait for the reception to end,” I whispered.
The tears didn't come with a sob. They came hot, quiet, and heavy, running down my left cheek where the bruise was now beginning to darken into a dull, plum-colored knot the size of a walnut.
“He was going to take the box into the men’s room,” I said, the realization settling into my stomach like a bucket of cold gravel. “He was going to take the cash, stamp the checks, and put the empty cards back into the box. And then he was going to come out and tell me that one of the kitchen boys must have walked off with the envelopes while everyone was watching the first dance.”
Ellis pulled me against his ribs. He didn't say, *“It’s okay.”* He didn't say, *“He didn't mean it.”* Ellis was an English teacher who spent five hours a day reading essays written by sixteen-year-olds who thought they could hide their laziness behind big words; he had a profound, instinctive hatred for lies that sounded like comfort.
“He’s an amateur, Esther,” Ellis said into my hair. “He’s been an amateur his whole life. He thought because he could intimidate Sanford when Sanford was seventy-five and could barely hear the tea kettle, that he could do it to everyone else. But he’s out of room now. He’s reached the end of the board.”
We sat together on the cedar steps for thirty minutes, opening every card, writing down every dollar amount in the small reporter’s notebook Marcus Vance had left behind on table one.
When we reached the bottom of the box, beneath forty-one cards and three small boxes containing silver teaspoons and hand-crocheted pot holders, we found one final envelope.
It wasn't white linen. It was a brown pay envelope, three inches by five inches, the kind the furniture plant had used in the nineteen-seventies before direct deposit was invented. The paper was soft, furry at the corners, smelling faintly of tobacco and cedar oil.
On the front, written in blue pencil that had faded until it was barely grey, were three words:
*For Essie’s Roof.*
Inside were three ten-dollar bills, two one-dollar bills, and four dimes.
Thirty-two dollars and forty cents.
Pinned to the three tens was a note written on the back of an old receipt from a feed store in Plainwell, dated October twelve, nineteen-ninety-seven:
*Essie—*
*Your dad says the cedar shingles on the north pitch are going to rot before you finish high school. He wants me to put tin over them. Tin makes too much noise when it rains, and a girl can’t hear herself think when the roof is shouting at her. Keep the wood. Pay the carpenter what he asks. Never let a man tell you that tin is just as good as cedar because it’s cheaper to haul.*
*—Grandpa Sanford.*
May you like
I held those three ten-dollar bills against my mouth until the paper was wet with my spit and my tears, and Ellis held me until the lodge grandfather clock struck one in the morning, its brass pendulum swinging back and forth in the cold, empty room like an iron blade that had finally cut the last cord.
***
